Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Party wins big in Vietnam, but with a few twists
As has happened every few years since the mid-1940s Vietnam’s Communists won parliamentary elections last month by a landslide, claiming 91.6 percent of the chamber’s 500 seats, officials announced on Friday. No surprises there. The Communist Party has a constitutionally-mandated monopoly on power.
We noted in a story on election day that the vote was rigged to retain party control although the outcome would allow for the legislature’s role in policymaking to continue to grow incrementally.
On Friday the results showed that more self-nominated candidates and more businessmen were elected to the unicameral body this time around than ever before. Four out of 15 self-nominated candidates made it this year, including the vice chairwoman of Hanoi’s young businesspeoples’ association and a doctor who runs his own hospital. Four years ago at the last National Assembly election only 1 of the 30 self-nominees who ran landed a seat.
Voters handed seats to Dang Thanh Tam and Dang Thi Hoang Yen, two of the country’s best known capitalists and perhaps the country’s richest brother and sister duo. They preside over the conglomerate Saigon Invest Group and other companies. Pham Huy Hung, head of VietinBank, the country’s biggest partly-private bank, also got seat. So did Dinh La Thang, chairman of state oil and gas group Petrovietnam, which is probably the country’s most influential company. State media said its revenues this year are expected to be close to a quarter of the nation’s GDP and it makes annual tax contributions that put it in a league of its own.
Carlyle Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the University of New South Wales, said the inclusion of businessmen in the national assembly followed the Party’s decision to allow entrepreneurs into its ranks and even install some on its policy-making Central Committee at a congress in January. “The National Assembly seems to be following that theme of getting people with practical experience that are safe into the National Assembly to add their expertise to the process,” he said.
But it may be a while before everyone’s comfortable with the arrangements. Nguyen Si Dung, deputy director of the National Assembly Office, told reporters there was some concern about conflict of interest with regard to businesspeople now participating in the heretofore rubber stamp parliament. He called for a code of conduct that would prohibit business owners from lobbying or voting for any law that relates to their business interests, such as the law on corporate tax. Businessmen also shouldn’t join the economic committee, he said.
Other demographic targets were missed. Seventy-eight people from ethic minority groups were elected, 12 fewer than targeted; 122 women won seats, 28 below target and 1.36 percent fewer than in the outgoing parliament; 62 people under the age of 40 were elected, eight under target and 1.39 percent lower than last time. Finally, 42 non-party members won seats, which missed a 10 percent target.
from Andrew Marshall:
Risks to watch in Asia: Country guides
For Reuters analysis of risks to watch in Asian countries, kept updated in real time and with graphics and video, click on the links below.
from Afghan Journal:
Afghanistan: neither Vietnam nor Iraq, but closer home perhaps
[Women at a cemetery in Kabul, picture by Reuters' Ahmad Masood]
As U.S. President Barack Obama makes up his mind on comitting more troops to Afghanistan, the search for analogies continues. Clearly, Afghanistan cannot be compared with Vietnam or Iraq beyond a point. The history, geography, the culture and the politics are just too different.
The best analogy to Afghanistan may well the very area in dispute - the rugged Pashtun lands straddling the border with Pakistan and where the Pakistani army is in the middle of an offensive, argues William Tobey in a piece for Foreign Policy.
Tobey, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfar Center and who served on the National Security Council staff under three U.S. presidents, takes a walk down history to the 1936 uprising against British rule in Waziristan.
The rebels were driven by radical Islam, Pashtun nationalism and armed opportunism, much the same factors firing up the modern Taliban campaign.
"The rebels improvised roadside bombs, ambushed convoys, and launched hit and run attacks on isolated outposts to drive out alien forces. They kidnapped and beheaded British soldiers and civilians. In unprotected villages, they massacred civilians who did not support them. "
Mufaso, concerning Iraq, all America wanted is for the country to be stable enough to keep a puppet government in power who is strong enough to keep the oil flowing.
Now that this has pretty much achieved it could probably be said that they won their war, though it cost them a lot more than expected, they could care less if the entire country turned was ruined in the process..
Oil flow guarantees US reconstruction contracts in Iraq and a dependable supplier of oil for the future (no more OPEC oil leverage or embargoes).
Ricardo, Afghanistan is a geo-strategic and economic prize none the less. There has been a plan for a ‘trans-Afghan pipeline’ for many years now that will tap into the vast natural gas reserves of central Asia distribute it through the region via Afghanistan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afgha nistan_Pipeline
Here’s what Obamas top political adviser has to say about central asia:
“About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
“exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.”
“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained”
“For Pakistan, the primary interest is to gain Geostrategic depth through political influence in Afghanistan – and to deny to Iran the exercise of such influence in Afghanistan and Tajikistan – and to benefit eventually from any pipeline construction linking Central Asia with the Arabian Sea”
“That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.”
“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Afghanistan, still the new Vietnam ?
Try hard as you can, there doesn't seem to be any escaping from comparing America's eight-year war in Afghanistan to the one it fought in Vietnam.
Every now and then, either when there is a fresh setback or a key moment in Afghanistan's turbulent history, like last week when it went to the polls to choose a president, the debate flares anew.
Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative piece headlined "Saigon 2009: Afghanistan is today's Vietnam. No question mark needed." No matter who wins last week's election, America is certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan because it is committing the same mistakes it did in Vietnam, authors Thomas H.Johnson and M Chris Mason argue.
The parallels are just too strong, too structural to be ignored. Both Afghanistan and Vietrnam (prior to U.S. engagement there) had surprisingly defeated a European power in a guerrilla war that lasted a decade, followed by a civil war which last another decade. Insurgents in both enjoyed the advantage of a long, trackless and unclosable border and sanctuary beyond it, the authors say.
Both were land wars in Asia with logistics lines more than 9,000 miles long and extremely harsh terrain with few roads, which nullified U.S. advantages in ground mobility and artillery. Almost exactly 80 percent of the population of both countries was rural, and literacy hovered around 10 percent. In both countries, the United States sought to create an indigenous army modeled in its own image, based on U.S. army organization charts.
But above all, the United States has consistently and profoundly misunderstood the nature of the enemy in each circumstance, the authors say. "In Vietnam, the United States insisted on fighting a war against communism, while the enemy was fighting a war of national reunification. In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad.". In short, it is hard, almost impossible, to defeat an enemy you don't understand.
from UK News:
Is Britain paying too high a price in Afghanistan?
The death toll among British troops in Afghanistan is rising fast. The soldier who died on Tuesday was the seventh to die in the last week and the 176th since the war began.
Last Wednesday, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe became the highest ranking British soldier to die in the conflict in Afghanistan when he was killed in Helmand. British commanders are quoted as saying things are going to get worse before they get better.
Not surprisingly, doubts are being raised about the price being paid in Afghanistan, about the nature of the mission itself and whether security can ever be made effective enough to rebuild the country after 30 years of war.
Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth concedes there is gloom about the rising death toll but rejects comparisons with the Vietnam war that lasted over 15 years and says there is a "real sense of momentum" in Afghanistan.
Do you believe Britain should stay in Afghanistan?
We have been beaten before in Afghanistan , the Russians were beaten in the same way ,with all the manpower and Military recources they have . The people are not worth wasting the precious lives of our young soliers ,as they offer little if any help to improve there own situation. When we and the others eventually leave,the Country will quickly revert to its old ways of fuedalism Corruption and illtreatment of its women. WE SHOULD LEAVE NOW
“Vietnam the war” back in the frame after Afghanistan
For many, Vietnam has always been two things – a war and a country. Since probably the mid-1990s, though, when Washington and Hanoi established diplomatic relations, the balance — in terms of headlines at least — started to tip decisively toward “Vietnam the country”.
Vietnam’s economic transition and integration with the world has, indeed, made for some decent reading. So it’s been interesting to note since moving to Hanoi a few months ago the strong comeback that “Vietnam the war” has made in the form of articles about Afghanistan and the Obama presidency.
In February, Newsweek ran a cover story called Afghanistan “Obama’s Vietnam“. Other examples are plentiful.
China’s elusive land reform
It is ironic that 30 years after they gave birth to the reforms that transformed China into an economic powerhouse, the country’s vast hinterlands are still dogged by poverty.
The breathtaking growth of the economy since the pro-market reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping has led to an extraordinary increase in real living standards and an unprecedented decline in poverty. According to World Bank estimates, more than 60 percent of the population lived under the $1 per day poverty line at the beginning of economic reform. This had fallen to 10 percent by 2004, so - on this narrow measure at least – about 500 million people were lifted out of poverty in a single generation.
“Only development makes hard sense,” said President Hu Jintao in a December 18 speech to mark the anniversary of reform, reviving a slogan that Deng used to spur on investment and spending.
And yet vast swathes of China’s countryside were bypassed by the economic boom that transformed its cities and eastern seaboard. Agriculture now accounts for only about one-tenth of China’s GDP even though it supports more than half the population.
Much of the rural poverty problem in China can be traced to the inadequacy of the land reform introduced after 1978 and the fact that, even today, rural land is still legally under “collective” ownership.
Although collectivised farming was replaced by a system that assigned 30-year, non-transferable land-use contracts to households, peasants were not given marketable ownership rights to the land they farmed or the freedom to use it as security on which to borrow and invest. Worse, land was not necessarily allocated to the most efficient farmers and the vast majority worked on so-called “noodle strip” patches that were too small for economies of scale. One of the biggest failings of the de-collectivised system, however, was that it did not shield farmers from the threat of expropriation by officialdom, a major disincentive to investment.
This led to local governments exploiting the countryside as a source of money and power, with the weak legal foothold that farmers had on their land only making life easier for unscrupulous and corrupt officials. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Xiaobo Zhang in a speech “land is being grabbed at a fraction of its market value for supposed public purposes, and then being provided to private investors to promote local economic growth”.
No different than the U.S. where the corporations picks two candidates and allows the election of one of their two choices, all the while pretending it was a real election. Democracy is 100% dead now in the U.S. In my home region the local Democrats hold a primary election that has no authority at all to select the candidate. The local party bosses select the candidate. The other party allows for 25% of the selection process to be controlled by the primary, leaving the controlling 75% to the party bosses. No democracy in America any longer.